I wriggled away, slightly annoyed. I took a gulp of pi?a colada too quickly and felt my sinuses burn from the sudden chill.
“I’m trying to succeed in a capitalist system.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “But that doesn’t mean I like the game. Like I said, I worked the system.” S shook his head and let out a chuckle, rubbing more sunscreen onto his arm.
I searched through the screenshots saved on my phone and held it up to him. He squinted to read out loud: “‘Fuck capitalism, but until it’s fucked, keep getting that bag.’”
“Whatever you say.” He laughed.
I looked down at my stomach, adjusting the top of my bikini. At least this paid vacation （or job, or whatever one wanted to call it） gave me the chance to push my own brand, which I’d started, financed, and now operated with only the help of Kat, who owned a percentage of the company. Kat was a senior at my high school when I was a freshman, and when I moved to New York, we’d reconnected and become close friends. She’d worked in fashion for years before she joined me. Kat’s boyfriend was almost ten years older than she, divorced with two kids. He managed a real estate investment trust and owned several homes. When he’d ask Kat about business, she didn’t like to answer or give specific numbers. “It’s just weird,” she whispered to me, even though no one else was around. “It’s like, I don’t want to tell him anything until, like, we can really blow his mind. You know? He’s in it. One of the boys. I don’t want to be the girls running a cute business. I want to fuck them all up.”
I knew what she meant. I also wanted to be someone men like that couldn’t dismiss. While I wasn’t at all interested in becoming a girlboss type, I figured it would be stupid to use my body to promote some rich guy’s bikini line instead of my own.
One of my favorite pieces of art is by a woman named Hannah Black. She’s mostly a writer, but she occasionally creates work that is political, and the one that I love is an audio recording. You can hear it online—it’s accessible to everyone. The whole piece is comprised of famous women singers, mainly black, singing the words “my body” over and over. Rihanna, Beyoncé, Whitney. The two-second clips play on a loop: “My body. My body! My bow-day!”
“My body!” I sang out loud in my best Rihanna voice, thinking of Hannah Black’s piece as I stepped into the water, adjusting my wet bikini bottom to wedge it farther up my ass. The image of Halle Berry emerging from the surf in Die Another Day came to mind. Halle Berry was hot, I thought, yet she only managed to win an Oscar by making herself look ugly, in Monster’s Ball. I remembered what my agent had told me. “If you want people to think of you as a good actress, you’re going to need to get ugly.” She’d said it as if it were obvious. I felt a sudden urge to cover myself up.
Just a month earlier, Jessica had sent me a quote of Halle’s via DM. “My looks haven’t spared me one hardship,” it read.
“The funny thing abt this is at first it really pissed me off bc he-llo HALLE BERRY!?” Jessica had written. “But then I started thinking about your life and how I’d assumed you had everything I could ever want bc of the way you look. But obviously I now know that’s not true. It’s not true for any woman! Even if you’re Halle fucking Berry. As a woman I’m always thinking if only my ass was a little tighter or my nose was a little smaller my whole life would be different if only I made myself more appealing to men.”
Bc he-llo HALLE BERRY, I repeated in my head. Did this vacation perfectly disprove Halle’s point? But then why did I feel so uneasy? The contract I’d signed with the hotel lurked in the back of my mind. I was dizzy—from the alcohol or the sun, I wasn’t sure.
Back in my chair, I opened Instagram to a new post from a young actor. She was wearing a turtleneck dress, with her brown hair parted neatly to the side like a 1940s movie star, a diamond stud in her ear. She was beautiful, this girl, Rachel. I’d known her for several years, from way back when she was blond. We’d met on the set of a catalog job for a big clothing company.
I liked her right away, even though I found her attitude a bit too chirpy. Work was work to me, not fun, even if the shoot was glamorous, but she was energetic and chatty, trying hard to charm the client and the other models. She sipped Evian through a straw as she told me all about her stepfather, a man thirty years her mother’s senior and one of the biggest actors of my parents’ generation. When she went to the bathroom, the hairdresser tsk-tsked, curling my hair around a hot iron and muttering acidly, to me or maybe to himself, “Of course Daddy is famous.” I watched Rachel in the reflection of the mirror as she returned, meeting my eyes, her full lips parted in a smile.